732 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. (VoL, XXXII. 
were busy with the whale fishery and paid no attention to 
the deer, but when the fawns were about a month old, small 
parties used occasionally to go off in quest of fawn skins for 
making fine garments and trimmings. They told us that they 
were able to catch the fawns by running them down. In warm 
weather, when the deer took to the water to escape the flies, 
they were still chased in kaiaks and killed with a light lance, in 
the manner so generally practiced by the Eskimos. 
These Eskimos had many garments made of the skin of 
the mountain sheep, and water dippers were very generally 
made from the horns of this animal, which is the light-colored 
form known as Ovis canadensis dalli. Most of this material 
was doubtless obtained by trade, but some of our acquaintances 
had hunted the sheep in high rocky ground, “ eastward — far 
away.” 
Lemmings, both Cuniculus torquatus and Myodes obensis, 
occasionally appear in great abundance. In 1882 we saw 
none, but the natives began to catch them in January, 1883, 
and through the season we saw plenty of them. As they spend 
most of the time in the tunnels which they make in the moss 
and under the snow, they are seldom seen in winter, except 
during drifting snowstorms, when the snow over their burrows 
is probably blown away. The Eskimos believe that at such 
times they have come down from the sky, whirling round and 
running about in spirals as soon as they touch the ground. 
The first one that we obtained was brought in by an Eskimo, 
who told us, “ There are none here on the land. As it was bad 
weather he fell down from above.” 
Compared to the mammals, the birds of the region were of 
little importance to the Eskimos, though they knew and dis- 
tinguished by name nearly all the species which we found to 
occur there. During the spring enormous numbers of eider 
ducks used to pass up the coast, on the way to their breeding 
grounds in the east, and a few scattering pairs remained to 
breed. These were mostly of two species, the king eider 
(Somateria spectabilis), which were the first to appear in ie 
migrations and were the most abundant, and the Pacific eider 
(S. v-nigra). Later than the eiders came the great flight of 
